


Ever-Everland

by karanguni



Category: The Culture - Iain M. Banks
Genre: Asphyxiation, Other, Reverse soulbond, Yuletide Treat, butchering science for fantasy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-14
Updated: 2016-12-14
Packaged: 2018-09-08 12:19:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8844784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karanguni/pseuds/karanguni
Summary: 'People do go crazy with life,' Hub says, quietly. 'Minds and humans both. You've been around the block a long time.'





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [republic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/republic/gifts).



> Happy yuletide! I had way, way too much fun with this - I hope you enjoy!

But what happens when the memory itself loses something, as when we forget anything and try to recall it? Where, finally, do we search, but in the memory itself?

\- St. Augustine, _Confessions_ (Chapter XIX)

* * *

The middle of all this starts on the Eximium Orbital, average as it is.

It is very, _very_ average. Eximium's only superlative quality is, as far as anyone can tell, its averageness.

This fact has not escaped the attention of Mada, a prisoner of the orbital now for four years ever since he found himself re-embodified.

 _Prisoner_ , he thinks, is probably the wrong word. The Hub would disagree with it - if not on moral grounds, then certainly on semantic ones. A prisoner you most definitely _cannot_ be if, at any time, you could jump on any _one_ of those fantastically great ships that come promising you great adventures of great fantasticness. Go do, Hub would say, whatever you want. Whatever the _hell_ you want, it might add, just to prove the point. Freedom of speech along with freedom of action: everyone in the Culture has both, eh?

Mada has been on this orbital for the four latest years of his 687 lived ones in an attempt to say to the Orbital, just as politely: _fuck you, too_. There's one more thing that Eximium Orbital has got that's superlative: the stubbornness of this one resident.

It's another morning in this new life of his, and it's another day of waking up to Hub going, 'Good morning, Mada, would you like to get off of this piece of superb near-modern engineering today? Coming close to orbit within the next 120 hours are-' and Mada can hear the Hub's voice fake an inhale '- the GCU _Ho Ho, Ha Ha_ , the GSV _More Gravity, Less Gravitas_ , and the sort-of-but-not-really Eccentric _Technical Difficulties,_ and the _very_ Eccentric _Kondylis Wouldn't Make It Gold_. All of them would be happy to take you somewhere where you'd be happier.'

Mada stares up at the ceiling of his average room in this average house. How do you calculate _averages_ , he wonders, in a society comprised mostly of random values? Drawing best fit lines for something that has no inherent pattern is just... graffiti.

'Mada?' prompts the Hub. 'Why do you make me call you if all you ever do is ignore me?'

'Pique,' he retorts.

'Ah,' says Hub. 'I see.' Its tone is so neutral that it's practically judgemental; it's a masterpiece of modulation. Ups and downs normalised until they reach… averageness.

Mada huffs a laugh and glands more VERTIGINOUS SINEWAVES. Let the Hub Mind waste another little cycle waiting on him. Let the whole galaxy breathe, inhale and exhale, expand and collapse on his heartbeat.

'Enjoying yourself, are you?' asks Hub, from some metaphysical distance away. The generated sound waves comprising its _voice_ are, of course, themselves coming from very nearby; but where _is_ Hub? Everywhere in this orbital's little grid? Nowhere? Packed into a little nucleus deep underground or high above them, duplicated and triplicated just in case? Mada follows the thought laterally and then sideways as well. 'If you hate this so much,' he hears Hub say, 'why not _do_ something else? You're good at your numbers.'

A Mind, telling him he's _good at his numbers_ . Mada doesn't huff this time: he _laughs_ until he's wheezing. He should flush all the shit he's glanded out of his system, but no. Nothing's as… mind-bending as a _Mind_ telling you that you're _good at numbers._

'… computation isn't conceptualisation, you know,' Mada resurfaces a little in time to hear Hub mutter. 'The ability to test many conjectures isn't of any benefit if you can't ask the right questions.'

'Are you some sort of a-' Mada hiccups '- a _heretic_ , Hub? Do you think mathematics is _invented_ and not discovered? Careful. I don't think they make Orbitals Eccentric just yet.'

'There's always death,' Hub points out flatly. 'If you're going batty with life.'

A lance of panic slashes a gaping, sober wound across Mada's high. He glands PEACE and sits up. His sheets are a mess about him; he can't remember when he had last bothered to get up to do anything. All Culture bodies are so conveniently engineered for minimum need to piss and maximum desire to jerk off, after all; too bad he doesn't have a cock, or a vagina, or anything else to tug or schlick or -

The high passes, and with it that flash of manic-panic.

'People _do_ go crazy with life,' Hub says, quietly. 'Minds and humans both. You've been around the block a long time.'

'A long time that I don't remember,' snarls Mada. 687 years and he remembers… not much of it. There are shadows in his mind, except it's not quite _his_ mind. Bits of his memory have been excised, or maybe rearranged, like it was taken apart and then rebuilt. It's the old Gedankenexperiment: if you take Noah's floating barge apart, plank by wooden plank, and then put it back together again, do you still have _the_ ark, or do you just have a covenant that - once upon a time - there'd been something _like_ an ark, in this exact shape, made of these exact materials?

Mada puts his head into his hands and massages his temples. They don't ache. He's in perfect condition. That's how they make people, how people make themselves, in the Culture. 'Hub,' he says. His voice is ragged. 'Are you _sure_ I wasn't just… fucked with? When they decanted this body - are you sure that they– that _we_ got it right?'

'I presume you don't mean the specifications of your physical parts,' Hub says, horrifically gentle. Mada shakes his head. Hub goes on. 'Your mind-state was received a day before the body was, as you put it, decanted. The contract had been in place for decades beforehand.'

'Don't you have _backups_?' Mada isn't begging.

'Said contract explicitly specified that all backups were to be of the latest copy and the latest copy alone. I have that final image in n-plicate; all the ones before it, though, are gone. I'm not a _meatfucker_ , Mada, give us both some credit here.'

'And it _was_ me?'

'Yes. Everything matched up. I'm sorry, Mada, but you _are_ you, whoever you are. Maybe you thought it'd be better this way. Maybe you had something you really wanted to forget.'

'You can't be glad of negative space when you spend your whole life wondering what's _in it_ ,' snaps Mada, then he sighs. 'If I wanted to forget something, I did a cock-up job of it.' He moves his hands to cover his face and sits very still.

'Human memory is fungible,' says Hub, still in that careful tone. 'Even if the decanting was to spec, memories still surface in strange and unpredictable ways. Something might come up.'

'I've waited for four years,' says Mada. He's exhausted. 'I've given myself time. I've given myself the benefit of peace and quiet. All the things that coax a mind and a body to come to terms with one another, at least according to sound medical advice.'

'I sense an oncoming caveat,' ventures Hub.

Mada looks up. 'But it hasn't been working, has it?' Hub hums, noncommittal. Mada snorts, then asks, 'That Eccentrics you mentioned. Special Circs, are they?'

'I wouldn't know,' says Hub coyly.

'Bullshit. Eccentrics either are SC or hate SC; one way or another, that _makes_ them SC. Tell them I want an interview.'

'Normally,' Hub says slowly, 'it's not quite _done_ to ship someone off to SC without one of their spooks coming in to do a sniff-around. But in your case… I'll see who I can talk to.'

'Excited to evict me?' asks Mada, self-deprecating.

'No,' says Hub, sounding actually somewhat perturbed. 'Just you throw off my averages, Mada. People like you are built for something.'

'Don't talk God to an atheist,' Mada advises.

'If faith would bring back your memories,' says Hub, 'wouldn't you pray? Hub out.'

* * *

 

The trip out to meet with whatever Ship or drone or agent or what-have-you responsible for gauging his potential SC chops takes Mada off of the orbital for the first time in this life and into the gaping maw of the "I only wanted to be _titled_ Eccentric to get the extra form of address" GSV _Technical Difficulties_.

It's not getting on the GSV that presents an issue. Something in his bones, however new they are, _remembers_ ship-travel. It makes Mada suspect that maybe this had been who he'd been in his past lives: a ship-happy SC yob running around the galaxy Taking Care of Outliers. Careful average-massagers, aren't they? Maybe Eximium Hub had been very cleverly taking the shit with him about not being part of the cabal. Somehow, though, Mada figures that SC might've done a better job wiping him if they'd had any desire to bury his memories in the past.

So it's not the ship travel, or the prospect of meeting a SC spook. No, Mada's problem is that on the _Technical Difficulties_ are _people_.

There are people everywhere. There are people in every conceivable location having sex; there are people in every room talking. There are people in gymnasiums exercising, in libraries reading, in viewing galleries viewing. It's exposure on top of exposure on top of exposure. Mada'd spent most of his four years _alone_ on Eximium and happy about it; on the GSV he can't go two steps in any direction without having to speak to somebody.

If he opens his mouth to express discomfort, he'll have to talk to the ship Mind, which is possibly worse. It'll be accommodating to the point of infuriation. If he hides, the Mind will come asking if he's dying of something. GSVs are shaped like brooding amphibians, and in some trick of phenotypes influencing genotypes they all, eventually, become overprotective godparents to each and every sentient being that climbs aboard them.

That thought hits Mada like a shot in the dark fired off by some past, opinionated version of himself. It's too fully formed and rehearsed to have been completely spontaneous, and it makes the hair on the back of his neck stand.

The sense of _presque vu_ is shocking enough that he jerks and spills the drink in his hand all over himself. He's been in this bar (which bar? who knows, or cares?) for the last hour, trying to blend out of the morass of humanity around him by aggressively blending in. 'Fuck,' Mada mutters, and tries to mop it up.

'Sorry, your elbow,' he says to the person next to him as he goes at the spill with a napkin.

She turns, and objectively even Mada can tell that she's pretty. Gorgeous, really, and by _Culture_ standards, not this season's view of what's good looking or not. It's in the eyes. Old eyes, Mada thinks; eyes maybe a bit like his own. 'Sorry,' he says again, tossing the napkin.

'It's fine,' she says, smiling. Her voice is pleasantly deep, enough so that Mada's almost distracted from the way she puts her hand over her heart and bows a little. Idiosyncratic, but there are worse ways of being greeted hello on a GSV. He mirrors the motion as she goes, 'My name's Sma. Or Diziet Sma, if you'd like - I've been around a bit too much to bother with rattling off the whole thing.'

'Mada,' Mada says in return.

Sma cocks an eyebrow. ' _Just_ Mada?'

'Just Mada,' he confirms, picking up the drink that's materialised, refreshed, on the coaster in front of him. 'I've been around _too much_ too long to bother with _anything._ '

' _Oh_ ,' went Sma, her voice low and – counterintuitively – a bit like a whistle. Mada gets the sensation that he's just been given a little bit of a cat-call. 'How old?'

He shrugs. 'Who knows?' he asks, philosophically. 'The records says nearly seven hundred, but that's a bit young to be this jaded.'

'I hit four hundred a week ago,' provides Sma, like a dutiful member of Still Young Geriatrics Anonymous. 'I _think._ '

Mada snorts. 'Ever been shuffled from body to body?'

'Something like that,' responds Sma. 'But not really.'

Mada shrugs again. 'Well, that's what seems to be going on with me.'

He doesn't quite know why he's _talking_ so much; it's not like he's smashed off of his face. Mada supposes it has been a while since he's gone out and tried to interface with society. Or maybe it's less that he wants to socialise than it is the fact that the hairs on the back of his neck still haven't gone down yet. Safety in numbers, says some lizard brain, so he obeys.

Sma seems to pick up the thread of his story, even though he's given her no details. '"Seems to be?" You had your own records dismantled?'

'Maybe.' Mada wonders if there's a way to put on a _permanent_ shrug; lifting and relaxing his shoulders is becoming hard work. 'Pretty brilliant, isn't it? I don't know if I meant it to be this way or if it was some really good sabotage.'

'Are you trying to find out?' Sma shifts her weight, and it makes Mada abruptly aware of the fact that they are sitting quite close to one another. The shoulders of Sma's dress spill gently down her back, a waterfall that almost disguises how much skin is actually on display.

Mada leans away. 'I might be,' he says, a little coolly.

Sma catches onto that, and pats him on the elbow. 'For what it's worth, I'm not someone out of your past here to shoot you in the head for your unremembered sins.' Mada raises his eyebrows at that. Sma winks at him and drinks from an elaborately contrived flute that contains a substance that looks more like oil than anything else. 'I'm just trying to _sleep_ with you.'

'Not sure I want to sleep with someone who's reassuring me that she's not here to kill me,' Mada says. 'Seems like something someone who's here to kill me might say.'

Sma's laugh is the opposite of her speaking voice: bright and clear, like a rung bell. It's pleasant. 'Oh dear, I'm sorry,' she says, setting her drink aside. 'First of all, that'd be shoddy work on the part of your hypothetical assassin, but what I _should_ be saying here is that I have… experience with people like you.'

'Experience?' Mada can't help but ask.

'Lifetimes' worth,' says Sma.

She sounds serious, and Mada takes it that way. It's probably why, when next he opens his mouth, what he says is, 'Are you Contact, or SC?'

Sma leans both her elbows on the bar behind her and tilts her head backwards. The arch of her neck is exposed. Maybe she _is_ telling the truth: no assassin would be this... cavalier. Or this underdressed. But then Sma finishes stretching and looks at him again with those _eyes_. 'That's quite the question. Why don't we go somewhere a little more private and talk?'

'I'm still sleeping alone tonight,' Mada tells her, but it's more for those listening in curiously around them than anything else. He's passed that… test? Or failed it in some way? Whatever: he's been assessed. That's enough. He points with his drink to the exit and says, 'Lead the way, Ms. Sma.'

* * *

 

Diziet Sma doesn't sleep with him. In fact, she changes out of her dress and into dark ponte pants and a sleeved top. 'Something comfortable should _be_ comfortable,' she tells him with a laugh when she emerges from the closet.

They talk. About many things, but mostly about what Sma calls the _use of weapons_ , and why SC has too many of those.

'So you see, Mada,' she says, legs tucked up against her chin. 'I don't like negative spaces any more than you do. But SC finds them fascinating, of course – they're all magpies, attracted to anything that glints. And so they – SC and I – _we_ find _you_ fascinating.'

Mada, wedged into a corner of Sma's room, cocks his head. 'SC and you, like you're separate entities.'

'Nobody _makes up_ Special Circumstances,' laughs Sma. 'It's less molecular unit, more discrete entities that form an equally discrete group. The group can come to certain conclusions even when some of its bit parts don't agree. _I_ think that you could find out what's in that head of yours and go insane. _SC_ thinks that insanity doesn't exist, just varying levels of usefulness.'

'I'm not sure if you're trying to evaluate me, dissuade me from applying, or accept me into Contact all at once or not at all or _what_ ,' sighs Mada.

Sma just smiles. Mada closes his eyes and resists getting angry. When he opens them again, he sees Sma just… waiting. It's the uncanniest thing about her, this patience. This sense of _wait and see_. 'The universe doesn't find itself in crises often enough for SC to keep busy all the time. Your "application," if you want to call it that, is coming at a bit of a lull.'

'Sorry, not enough genocide - seasonal hiring's on hold?' Mada asks with deep irony. 'Think about the _children_ , Sma, who could be hurt by all those potential hair-triggers running around with nothing to occupy them but the horrifying prospect of having to live a happy and peaceful life.'

'Thanks,' Sma says, equally dry. 'If you're so keen on living peacefully, you could just _leave this alone._ '

'I'll just show myself to the nearest Mind willing to perform that operation on me,' quips Mada. 'Nothing we like better than a lobotomy!'

'Your manic cheerfulness is one particularly excellent feature of your resume,' Sma informs him. 'Many who have that trait go far in the _genocide business_.'

' _Contact_ ,' Mada spits, getting up. 'Why did I even bother?'

'Sit down,' commands Sma, and Mada's knees fold before he can register himself obeying. She's standing, now, and everything about her is _presence_ . 'Special Circumstances are what they are because they are _special_ , Mr. Mada. We'll call you, don't call us.'

Mada sits, pinned by that voice, until Sma relents. One small shrug of her shoulder and the world's suddenly allowed to start spinning in regular orbit again. 'It sounds to _me_ like you need a travelling companion and a way to find whatever it is you're looking for in the infinite negative-space of all your negative-space; those I _can_ provide. In exchange, we keep you under consideration. We keep an _eye_ on you, with your permission. Everyone sleep better at night that way.'

'I'll start tick-tocking like a bad time bomb just so that SC feels important instead of like babysitters,' Mada promises. 'So, where am I going?'

 

* * *

 

Sma can't get him to his pickup in any straightforward manner, so where Mada ends up going is nowhere: his ship will be coming to him, here to the _Technical Difficulties_.

'If we're babysitting you, you could do us a favour and babysit the _Other Inclinations_ ,' Sma tells him.

'What's wrong with it?' he asks.

'Nothing, in my opinion,' shrugs Sma. 'But I've always liked the ones that are a little separate from the herd. The sense I get is that some GSVs think that this one got engineered… Funny, let's just say.'

'Is it too homicidal or too friendly or _what_?'

Sma waves his question away and doesn't respond the rest of the time they spend making arrangements. Disgruntled, Mada takes refuge in his room - at least now he has a end (of sorts) and a means (of sorts). The ship doesn't even bother him, except to provide, when asked, that 'What Diziet isn't saying to you is that the _Other Inclinations_ is...'

There's a pause. Significant enough that Mada idly wonders how dramatic the ship thinks its being: ships don't need any human-appreciable amount of time to consider aspects of diction.

'Just spit it out, ship,' Mada says.

'… antisocial,' concludes the _Technical Difficulties_ eventually.

Mada actually finds himself laughing. 'Considering that there are ships that spend the better part of centuries wandering around the Outer Left Field documenting the most esoteric bits of anything they can find out in that wastevolume of nothingness, that's worrying.'

'Do you know the LSV _Descartes Wasn't Totally Wrong_?' asks the ship, sounding curious.

Mada thinks about it. Sunken as he is in the sheets of the bed (cottony; he's no fan of the amniotic throwbacks of a water bubble), it's no hardship to risk the headache that trying to remember gives him. 'Twitchy little ship,' he says eventually, chewing on each word as though enunciating them in the right way will make something feel right. Maybe futile, considering it's impossible to have muscle memory when your muscles are brand new, but man must have his superstitions just as there must be ghosts in all machines.

'Twitchy little ship,' Mada repeats himself. 'It's been out there for… a while now. I don't know how I know. It keeps up with the rest of the civilised world by boring it with its data packets. "Today it was cold in space, saw some dust" type updates for days.'

x Eccentric (Sort Of) GSV _Technical Difficulties  
_ o _GSV <redacted>, OAQS    _  

**_Hm._ **

x GSV <redacted>, OAQS  
o Eccentric (Sort Of) GSV  _Technical Difficulties_

**What is it?**

_x Eccentric (Sort Of) GSV _Technical Difficulties  
_ o _GSV <redacted>, OAQS    __

**Ever have a squishy know things a human isn't supposed to know? Or, maybe that's wrong: a squishy know things that they _shouldn't_ have known, just out of sheer statistical likelihood as opposed to any real impossibility.**

x GSV <redacted>, OAQS  
o Eccentric (Sort Of) GSV  _Technical Difficulties_

**All the time. That's what makes them so fascinating.**

'You're right,' ship tells Mada. 'Maybe things are coming back to you after all.'

'Wouldn't have known it if you hadn't named it,' shrugs Mada. He traces mindless patterns on the fabric beneath his fingertips. It's colder in this room than he wants it to be, but somehow he doesn't want to do something as pointless as _vocalise_ a order for a change in temperature settings. Or, worse, _move_ to get to the control panel. 'Anyway, I'm assuming you don't mean _that_ kind of antisocial. The _Totally Wrong_ would gladly take on a crew as long as the crew was okay with being bored to death for a year or so.'

'You're right there,' says ship. 'But I think I'll leave your first impressions unbiased.'

'You already _said_ it's "antisocial." Not exactly a glowing review, there.'

'You could forget I said that,' says ship.

Mada snaps his eyes open and glares up at- Well. No point in glaring at any _one_ point, but the ship will get _the_ point. 'Very funny,' he says, cold. 'Now go away, please.'

 

* * *

 

The Very Fast Picket _Other Inclinations_ is, well, very fast. It arrives what feels like post-post-haste; Mada doesn't have the chance to do so much as ask the _Technical Difficulties_ for an update on its location when the GSV reports that it'll be coming in in a few hours, give or take.

'That's a _very_ fast very fast picket,' Mada observes to Sma.

They're in a sauna, sweating. From what he can glean from what she wants to tell him, travel on a GSV for her type of "Contact diplomat" is like being on home leave. Mada's hung around Sma for the sheer circus-like value of watching someone trained in manipulation manipulate people very willing to be manipulated. In the three days since their initial meeting, he's fairly sure she's been in at least two orgies. He's also fairly sure that she'd booked this afternoon with him off more to give herself a break from the festivities than to say her goodbyes.

'Savour the ride,' Sma advises as her her hair - a wet, architectural pile of a bun - drips everywhere. 'If you're going nowhere, it's at least more enjoyable to be going nowhere very quickly.'

'I've never been on a vee-eff-pee before,' Mada says when he climbs - almost literally - into the cramped insides of the _Other Inclinations_.

'And I haven't been one for very long, so we can call it equal.'

Mada nearly hits his when he spins around to find that there's an _actual ship av_ standing there behind him. Crammed in, really: it's absurd that it's there at all considering the size of the livable space. The ship courteously expands the bulkhead a little, saving Mada from giving himself a concussion. Still. 'Wasn't expecting that,' he says, a little short of breath.

The av gives him a little smile and a wave of the fingers. Mada stares at it and it looks right back at him. There's barely enough space for a pet hamster in here, and there's an _avatar_? He settles for awkwardly raising the hand holding his one bag worth of worldly goods in an abortive wave. 'Hello...' he trails off.

' _Inclinations_ is fine,' says the av. No ship/Av split-personality disorder _here_ , then. Mada's heard horror stories, especially since it'd felt like everyone on the damned GSV'd cottoned on to him talking to SC. The great gossip network had then led to every "I heard from a friend who heard from the net about a friend who heard that SC eats children who stay up too late at night" anecdote being thrust upon him.

(The general consensus, for what the data is worth or isn't, seems to be that quirkiness of a ship could be expressed as an equation in the form of

[ ](https://www.codecogs.com/eqnedit.php?latex=quirkiness&space=&space%5Cfrac%7BT%7D%7Bv%7D&space*&space%5Cfrac%7B1%7D%7Bc%7D)

where T = time spent alone in space, v = the maximum speed of said ship, and c = the number of its crew, give or take a few independent variables &c. &c.)

The _Inclinations_  makes another gesture with its hands. 'Welcome aboard,' it says. 'Not much, and it'll be a bit of a squeeze for however long you're with me, but we can make it work.' It moves its hands, like it's shaping water, and the ceilings rise a little bit more and the bulkheads curve a little bit more pleasantly.

It's still not enough space to fit a pet hamster.

'Big on staying in av form all the time, are you?' asks Mada, setting his bag down on a newly-formed set of drawers. 'It _will_ be a tight fit.'

The av just smiles.

Mada sits on the small bunk bed. 'They called you _antisocial_ to my face, not _hypersocial_.'

The av keeps smiling. 'They're just upset that I won't play their game. It's why you're here, you know.' There's a vague sense of motion as the ship talks; they're apparently moving off and out of the GSV. 'Contact wants you somewhere very boring, I think.'

'A VFP is "very boring"?' Mada braces his arms behind him and leans back. 'They must've changed the job description while I wasn't looking. Always thought that you lot were basically travelling missiles - actually, I'm a little surprised that they made a new one at all.' He looks around the little ship, wondering how much he's not seeing. 'Didn't being very fast go out of style alongside with being at war with other people?'

'Sometimes "very fast" isn't just a metaphor for "a very fast delivery of justice from above,"' says the av, all irony and crossed arms. It's got the most expressive body that Mada's ever seen (and how many has he seen?) in a ship av: it has something to do with the way it uses its hands, as if gesture and gesticulation come naturally. It walks two fingers across the air. 'For the most part, I transport things. People, communications, etcetera. I don't go in for the drama of crash banging and ka-powing about the universe.'

'A _pacifist_ VFP?' Mada breaks out into a laugh. 'No wonder they don't like you.'

'I ignore a lot of incoming mail telling me to produce fireworks for private glory,' grins the av.

'This I've got to hear,' says Mada, crossing his legs on the mattress and settling in.

'Well,' starts the av, still wearing that flash of a smile. 'When I first got embodied in this, someone came calling and wanted a lift...'

 

 

The journey out, after they finish talking for hours, is quiet and pacific. The _Inclination_ 's av doesn't go away, but it asks if Mada would like a screen put up between them.

'Don't bother,' Mada tells it, surprising himself. He thinks about why, then shrugs. 'You don't get to put up a screen against me; I'm not going to put up a screen against you. If we're going to pull through this together, at least. Whatever "this" is.'

It occurs to him then that it's past due time for him to ask _where are we going_ , but the cabin is very quiet and the lights are very dim and he's warm, tucked into the cocoon of his small bunk. The av'd fashioned itself an actual hammock, and Mada watches it sway gently to and fro where it's hung up across the cabin. The ship is simulating a constant rolling motion; a gyroscopic throwback to a real sea-ship. They are under the decks together like this, weathering something.

There's something too perfect, Mada thinks, about travel. Or, at least, travel the way the Culture travels. Or, more specifically, the way that humans travel in it. There's no sense, he thinks, of it requiring anything to go from one place to any other place. No wind in one's hair. No sun on one's face. No battle against the void that stretches out beyond the outer fields of whatever ship one is on that day.

There are very few orbitals with no bad weather. There are no orbitals without some star. They are, on some basic level, things that life can use to measure days against; notches of time passed and things _experienced_.

Mada breathes out, audibly, and then in again. Out and then in again. His breath is a heartbeat in a body of silence. That's it, there. It's not that travel is too easy: it's the perfect-fake bubble of life support that ships give to their passengers. Not the infinite accomodations in the name of comfort, but the engineered ignorance that a ship is, in itself, a body.

Mada flexes his fingers, then rubs his hip with his thumb. He traces bone and flesh and muscle; trails a hand down to his knee and back up again before shivering.

Then he reaches out and touches the wall nearest to him. It's cold to the touch, at first, but then warms till he can't tell where his palm ends and the bulkhead begins. There's no heartbeat, nor pulse.

In the pitch darkness, he asks, 'Do you _feel_ your engines, or do you only… calculate their throughput?'

Silence for a moment, then a shuffling as though the av is repositioning. The lights don't go on. But very, very slowly, a humming fills the room. The wall beneath Mada's fingertips starts to vibrate. His breath catches in his throat, but then he swallows and turns his hand around to slide backs of his knuckles across the surface. Cold turns to warmth and warmth back to cold: the ship chases his touch.

They play together, for a while. When he gets tired, Mada - on a whim, or something else - pulls his shirt over his head, folds it, then sets it aside. Without a word, he settles his back against the wall. It curves to accommodate him. He bows his neck in towards his pillow and imagines, almost, a breath of air ghost across the top of his spine.

'What's the world look like out there, ship?' he asks, feeling sleepy and near-drugged despite his system running clean. For once, his head is quiet.

'If I told you that the stars are streaking by, would you believe me?' pipes up the _Inclinations_.

'Sounds like poetic bullshit,' replies Mada.

The av sniggers.

They both fall silent again. The vibrations against Mada's back start to vary; it's almost imperceptible, but it's there. Before he can ask, the avs says, 'Those are the wavelengths of light hitting me as we go along.'

Mada hums, just to see if he can achieve some sort of resonant frequency. Sometime between one attempt and the next, he falls asleep.

 

* * *

 

They go on. Mada doesn't ask what the _Inclinations_ is doing, or what its plan is; there's something driving it as surely as there's something driving him, and Mada doesn't think he should ask a question that he can't answer himself.

Mostly what they do is go places. Sometimes a place is the vicinity of a nebula; sometimes a place is a beach set up against a green ocean. They make a game of sending postcards - physical ones - to Sma. _Wish you were here; just kidding_ , type messages scrawled out and attached to native pieces of matter. They send her black sand in a bottle and hunks of meteorite and packets of local air, ducking back with engines roaring into civilised space to drop them off with bemused GCUs, all of whom pretend not to have SC affiliations.

The nubulae feel as good on his skin, pressed into him by the walls of the ship's cabin, as the sun does when Mada lays on beaches on foreign worlds.

'Any of this ringing some bells?' the _Inclinations_ asks as they laze on another sandy strip - they've started to hunt for the best coastlines, at this point, planetary system by planetary system. It has oversized sunglasses on and a drink in one hand.

'Still nothing,' Mada replies, sipping from his own drink. 'Sometimes when we're going from place to place, yes. I know the routes.'

Ship looks over, pushing its sunglasses down its nose. 'The routes? The telemetry?'

Mada shrugs and taps his temple. 'Numbers are easy.' He slurps from his straw. 'Easy to calculate, easy to visualise. I'm not as fast as you, but I can do that lateral jumping crap that the Contact recruiters in the sky like so much.'

'You never said,' the ship says, faintly amused and accusing at once.

'You never asked,' Mada replies. 'Besides, people like to ask me party-trick questions. What colour is the number three type nonsense. It's the fucking number three - it looks like nothing without context. Not to me, at least.'

The av shrugs in agreement. 'What's actually pretty, then?'

'Change in motion,' says Mada, closing his eyes and turning it to this world's sun. 'Change in angles. Change in sequences. I can see in exponents; I can see _meaningfully_ in exponents, because I can compare values to values and large numbers to other large numbers. The number of stars versus the number of grains of sand type numbers. I suppose if I thought about it more, I could put it down into formal mathematics, but -' He shrugs. 'Why bother?'

'Counterargument: why _not_ bother?'

Mada thinks about it. 'Because we're us,' he says eventually. 'We're the Culture. There are people - infinitely many people, if we treat this as a function of time - who will do what they do. Some will want to consider a subject like mathematical infinities whether they have the… biological aptitude for it or not. Some of those few will succeed. So for the field in question, hurrah. But then if you step back and ask what an important field of study...'

Mada snorts. 'We're the Culture. At some point, if you follow the axioms of this society out to their logical conclusions, you have to accept that someone finding a new species of who-gives-a-fuck in some jungle on some world is as important as inventing new maths, which is in turn as important as some graffiti poem that a drunk guy scrawled onto a bathroom wall while he covered a urinal in piss. That's what it means to live post-scarcity, and if people don't like it - if people want to go back to a place where competition, war and privation shit out a hierarchy of meritocratic value - then those people can go. The door's right there. It won't even them on the way out.'

The waves slosh about like a very polite audience applauding his speech. Mada sneaks a glance over at the av. It looks like it's trying not to laugh. 'What?' Mada asks, grumpily.

'It won't even hit those people on the way out,' says the _Inclinations_ , full of merriment, 'because "those people" are SC, and they'll walk back in whenever they want to.'

Mada puts his drink down and out of the way, then bends over and picks up a handful of sand.

 

* * *

 

'Sonic shower?' offers the _Inclinations_ later as they module on up back to the ship.

'I hope you find grains of sand in uncomfortable places for decades to come,' grumbles Mada; he's fairly sure he has sand in his eyes, sand in his ears, sand in his pants.

'You _did_ start the war,' the _Inclinations_ says sweetly. 'And I _am_ a very fast picket.'

 

* * *

 

They get tired of beaches and nebulae eventually, and start thinking about trying mountains and binary stars instead.

'I picked last time,' Mada says. 'You pick this time. I still don't know what you want to _do_ , besides help me dig up memories that might never come back.' Some nights, Mada's even come to terms with being all right about that eventuality. Some nights.

'I want to not do what I was made to do,' the av says, laying back on Mada's bed. The hammock only comes out at night, for some reason, whenever the ship decides it's night. 'You want to beat something in your body, I want to beat something out of mine. It works.'

Mada looks at the av; really looks at it. It hasn't changed in all the time they've travelled together: it's still very human, and very normal, but it isn't quite _generic_ , somehow. 'Why'd you pick this av?' he asks, out of the blue.

'What?' the av asks, creaking open an eye. 'Who I am? My avatar is as much me as this ship is me. One Mind, two bodies. I didn't pick being a picket, and I don't think I picked being this av, either. It felt right, and so I feel right.'

Something twinges in the back of Mada's head.

At first it feels like something he's about to recall, and then it feels like a sledgehammer. Starbursts of colour erupt across his vision, as disturbing as a numerical sequence terribly interrupted, as disorienting as a law turned around back into mere conjecture. It hurts, too, physically: a hell of a migraine that makes even the roots of his teeth ache.

He wonders if it's all going to come back to him, everything that he doesn't know he doesn't know. Mada reaches for it, whatever _it_ is. He chases the pain and it's like turning his eyeballs in upon themselves, inverting them or rolling them around until he can look into his own optical nerve and then into his own brain. Nothing. Nothing but _wrongness_.

'Ah, fuck,' Mada hears himself swear faintly before he retches all over the floor.

The av's on him in an instant; they've never touched before and its hands are - compared to the walls and curves and planes of the ship surface - shockingly cold. 'What's wrong?' it's asking.

'Migraine,' coughs up Mada. 'Or something. I don't know. I thought I was going to remember, but I don't _know_ -' He clutches at the av's shoulders and tries not to throw up a second time. 'I _need_ this,' he babbles. 'I _need to know_. What if I forget? What if I never remember? I _know_ I need to remember. Something- something's not right.'

'You're raving,' the _Inclinations_  says firmly, dragging him bodily over to the bed and putting him down. Mada feels a wet towel wipe at his face. He tries to bat it away so that he can curl into himself. The pain comes and goes in spikes and flashes, but nothing comes _with_ it and the more he tries to follow the sensation, the worse it gets. He shakes and jerks and tries to sit up. That, too, is a mistake.

'I'm going to pull your medical records,' the _Inclination_ warns. 'The ones that are public record, see if anything went wrong. I'm also plotting a course to the nearest GSV, just in case. Lay _still_ , damn it.'

The _Inclinations_ pushes him down, one hand on his shoulder. The other grazes Mada's throat.

Mada screams.

Mada screams, and screams, and then hurls himself into the av's arms and sobs. 'Something's wrong,' he says between hysterically taken breaths. 'Something is _wrong_.'

'You're right,' he hears the av say, and it sounds distant. 'Something is wrong.'

'What?' asks Mada, forehead damp against the crook of the av's neck.

'Can you turn around?' the av asks. 'Look at the wall.'

Mada turns; the av keeps his arms around him, supporting but not restrictive. Mada feels his mouth go dry. On the wall are his medical records. There's also a cross-referenced picture that he's never seen before: Mada'd neither cared nor wanted to know what he'd looked like previously. He'd always assumed the order had been put in for a clone.

'That's you,' he croaks, looking at the picture of the av, the picture of the av that's supposed to be a picture of _him_. 'That's _me_. You stole my face.'

'I've never seen this before,' says the av, quiet and still and grim. 'Never.'

Mada reaches down and grips the av's knee. His knuckles are white. The av isn't bothering to breathe. They're tangled together in an embrace of shared terror. 'Where were you made?' he asks. The migraine is gone, or maybe he's numb. 'Which GSV?'

' _What Are The Civilian Applications?_ ' says the ship. A pause. 'Currently OAQS.'

'Get us there,' grunts Mada. 'Get us there _now_.'

 

* * *

 

Mada doesn't know how long it takes. He stays where he is, and the av doesn't move. The whole ship shakes the entire time; they are going fast, very fast. They go and they go and they go.

'Hello, child,' says _What Are The Civilian Applications, OAQS_ when they get there. Mada gets the impression that the ship hadn't given polite advance notice. The _Civilian Applications_  doesn't have an av, but it's sent a drone to speak to them in the bay. Mada is plastered against the outside of the _Inclinations_ , back against its bulk. The drone flashes in what reads as _amusement_. 'I was hoping you'd be back sooner rather than later. We've got uses for that body, after all.'

The _Inclinations_  steps in front of Mada.

The drone tilts back and forth, definitely finding this funny. 'Not _that_ body. Don't be angry - trust me when I say this was _all_ your idea.'

'Whose?' Mada croaks. He hasn't spoken since _before_. 'Whose idea?'

'Your idea,' the drone says. 'Yours both, I suppose. But it would be better to say _your_.'

The semantics make everything hurt again. The drone wiggles its way into facing the av. 'There are some coordinates that will get you on your way towards answers that are a lot better than any I've got to give. You've always been a free-thinker, you know.'

'Always?' echoes the _Inclinations_. 'All four years of _always_?'

The drone is now deep purple. 'Enjoy,' it says to them, and floats away.

'Let's go,' says Mada, grabbing the av by the arm. 'Wherever it's sending us, let's _go_.'

 

* * *

 

They gain a Contact tail before they're even out of blinking range of the _Civilian Applications_. The ship makes as many hop-skip motions as it can to shake it, but -

'It's not working; they're like flies,' the av reports. 'When I lose one, I gain another.'

'We're in the middle of _fucking nowhere,_ ' swears Mada. And they are: they're out in a dust cloud and increasingly far away from centres of actual civilisation. Fact of the matter is that the only ship around, besides their persistent paranoid Contact friend-of-the-moment, is the _Descartes Wasn't Totally Wrong_. That crazy dust-data gatherer.

It hangs in space a mere blip away from them.

'That's it,' the ship says.

'What?' Mada stares at the projection on the viewport. ' _That's_ it?'

'It's the right place. And I don't think anyone's actually… home.'

Mada looks over. The av looks puzzled, brows furrow. 'What do you mean?'

'It isn't talking to me,' it says. 'It feels hollow.'

Presque vu, once more. 'Ask if we can come on,' Mada says, firm.

A pause. 'No reply,' says ship.

'Then get us on there anyway,' Mada commands. 'Displace us in.' The av twitches beside him. 'I don't care if it's bad form,' Mada says. 'Do it.'

The displacement takes no time at all, and ends in Mada hacking up a cough. The air inside the ship is stale. There's no crew. There's no greeting, offended or otherwise. There's… silence, like a masouleum.

But it's familiar. It is, Mada knows with the first measure of certainty he has had in this life, _home_. He walks and his feet know where they're going. When the av reaches out to pull him back, Mada takes the _Inclinations_ by the wrist and pulls.

Corridors give way to a door. It doesn't give to his touch, but Mada pulls the _Inclinations_ ' hand up and touches the panel. It slides open to reveal another corridor, this one narrower and dark. It doesn't seem to matter; Mada would know this footing anywhere.

'This is,' the av says from behind him, 'heading towards the central casing for the Mind.'

'Minds,' Mada says. 'Minds, plural, I think.'

The corridor terminates in a room. And it is a room, not just a casing: there's a chair, and a bed, and many screens along the walls. When they step inside, lights flicker to life.

Trance-like, Mada sits on the bed. When the av tries to take the chair, he pulls it back, settling it down between his legs. The av is tense; Mada feels nothing but calm. He puts his chin on the _Inclinations'_  shoulder as one of the screens comes alight and a recording of the start of the end starts to play.

 

* * *

 

The recording begins with a crew on the _Descartes Wasn't Totally Wrong_. A normal crew, by Culture standards, if small: just a handful. The footage is observational, not narrative. People work and people play and people sleep; everyone is friendly.

The _Totally Wrong's_  av is in every scene. It looks, to the nth degree of likeliness, like Mada. The crew speak to it like an old friend.

The timestamps of the clips start to jump. One year passes, then suddenly three. Some crew leave, others join. Ten years pass, then twenty. Telemetry scrolls past; Mada knows without knowing how that they're travelling broad sweeps of big sectors. Thirty years from the date of the first clip, they watch the last remaining member of the original crew go: with her goes everyone else, all and sundry decanted onto a GSV. It's the  _Civilian Applications._

The _Totally Wrong_ 's av comes back on screen in the empty ship; the empty house. The footage follows it as it walks down the same corridor that Mada and the _Inclinations_ had walked down minutes earlier, into this same room.

On the bed is a human. He looks, to the nth degree of likeliness, like the _Inclinations_. The _Totally Wrong_ 's av comes close, then comes closer still. The human rises from where he's seated in the chair, and they meet halfway, kissing.

Mada can't breathe.

There's a hardware uplink from the human on screen; it runs from his neck to the encasement. Not a simple neural lace: a _full uplink_.

'Fuck,' swears the _Inclinations_ from behind Mada. 'Fuck, it's _plugged in_. _He's_ plugged in'

'Minds,' repeats Mada, feeling a thousand years young. Is that how old he _really_ is? ' _Minds,_ the _Civilian Applications_ said.'

On screen, they watch as the human runs his hands through the av's hair. 'It's been a while,' they hear him say. Mada recognises his own voice.

'Almost two hundred years, this time around,' they hear the _Totally Wrong's_ av agree. It sounds like the _Inclinations._  'Almost time enough for us to start hating each other once more.'

'Time to start again?' they hear the human ask; they watch as he smiles.

'I'll be glad to be rid of you for a while,' they hear the av smile back.

'Liar,' the human says. 'You'll spend years wondering why you feel like you're not what you are. I'll spend years wondering what's missing.'

'Other humans,' the av says, with centuries of humanity reflected in its eyes, 'go on dates, or so I've heard. Or engage in other forms of courtship.'

'Boring,' dismisses the human. He leans in and they sway, a slow dance. 'I'm ready, in any case. I'm making it difficult this time - I've sent the Quietudinal Services a heavily wiped set of memories. We'll see how long it takes for us to figure it out. Are you ready?'

' _What Are The Civilian Applications_ has received my mind-state and would like you to know that it thinks we are, in no small words, "disgusting and could do with a little less romance,"' the av says. It reaches up and unplugs the nueral uplink.

Mada shudders as the human on screen shudders.

'It's just jealous,' Mada watches himself say. 'And if it wants a little less romance, we can send it a copy of this-'

'No,' the _Totally Wrong's_ av cuts his old self off, pulling the human backwards towards the bed. 'I'd prefer _not_ to be known as "That Other Kind of Meatfucker", thank you, no matter how ironically meant.'

'That's just you acting coy,' the human says.

They watch the human shove the av down; they watch as clothes are shed; they watch as the av touches the human; they watch as the human murmurs too-quiet words into the av's ear. They watch as the pace of their fucking intensifies, as the human leaves red streaks down the av's back, as the av pushes its thumbs into the balls of the human's shoulders and makes him howl.

They watch as the human, half-delirious and close to orgasm, takes the av's hands and places them around his throat. They watch as the av closes his fingers around the human's throat; they watch as it tightens its grip. They watch the human struggle and gasp for unattainable air; they watch as the human comes, jerking with the sensation; they watch as he passes out. The watch the av keep up the pressure around the human's throat. They watch the human pass away, one life ended so that another can begin somewhere on the Eximium Orbital.

They watch the av pull back afterwards; they watch it place a quiet kiss to the man's forehead. They watch him as it wraps the body, gently and lovingly and respectfully. They watch as it heads to the encasement, opens it, shorts it out. They watch the ship die, both its Minds now somewhere and somewhen else.

The recording ends.

Neither Mada nor the _Inclinations_ move.

The lights go to full strength. A small case floats out towards them. They reach out at the same time and their hands knock it to the ground; it falls open to reveal a hard set of backups; one a human neural image, the other the high-density nub of a backed-up Mind.

'Contingencies,' gasps out Mada, all of him half laugther and half adrenalin fuelled hysteria. There are infinite halves of him, really: relief, euphoria, arousal, comfort, amusement, _peace._  ' _Contingencies_. We were… very good at them, apparently. I guess this saves us a trip to QS.'

The _Inclinations_ puts his head down against Mada's shoulder and laughs and laughs and laughs. Mada turns him around and they stay pressed together, hiccupping and gasping until the madness passes.

Eventually, the _Inclinations_ gets up off the bed and kneels to pick up the box. It lifts it up between them. 'Mada,' it says. 'Would you like to remember me?'

'Would _you_ like to know what your real inclinations are?' Mada asks in return.

 

* * *

 

They send Sma a postcard. It's written on the outside of the hollow shell of a Very Fast Picket, but at least this one delivers itself.

 

* * *

 

There was a time when time wasn't,  
nor space for that matter/  
anti-matter, when every manner  
of thing and not-thing didn't,

before the whole dime-bag shebang  
blew up in its (non)face-  
and suddenly there was place  
and separation of thing,

a super-heated flux cooling toward  
past, present, and future,  
spilling its thinning soup du jour  
to an ever-everland,

where deeper meant ever younger,  
and we'd look just as young  
to anything or anyone  
perceiving here from there;

and they as well would show to us,  
delayed some billion years,  
a face as featureless as ours,  
home movies out of space;

thus they or we could bang ourselves  
to barrenness or less,  
while telescopes revealed  
a past appropriate as hell.

\- John Pidgeon, _Star Dust_

**Author's Note:**

> Apologies are owed to, amongst many references, Genesis, Costas Kondylis, and so on. He who puns would pick a pocket! Many thanks to whetherwoman for the beta/cheerleading.


End file.
